Bad links or poor content?

[jj3434]

Hi all

I have a meeting with our seo company tomorrow.... Our sites have dropped considerably for our main keywords. My opinion is that the links that have been built for us have focused on too few anchor text and many "money making" keywords. Also to deep pages rather than the home page. They are saying it's poor content (I guess they would). We copyscape check all content before putting live.

Has anyone any evidence I could present to them to back up my argument?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Try Open Site Explorer here Jason.

Also, building links to a wide selection of pages, and not all to the home page, is a positive, not a negative. However, diverse anchor texts and related referring sites play a big part in this and as long as a link has a good reason to exist on a page, I am sure Google will see this as a plus.

Andy

[jj3434]

I've used the Open Site Explorer and it's showing that in some cases 70% of the links are based on one anchor text...

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Then I would be looking for that to diversify in some order. If you had 100 links, to have 5-10 with the same anchor text is acceptable, as long as they form part of a sentence. You don't really want links that just sit there on their own amongst other links and that serve no real purpose. There are exceptions to this rule, however.

Would have to see some to give you more of an idea.

Andy

[jj3434]

An example being "mobility scooters" anchor text forms 209 links out of a total of 318.....

[Andy.Drinkwater]

That is far too high Jason - with 300 links, I would want to see no more than 15-30 using that anchor text alone. There should be variations such as:

• New mobility scooters
• Used mobility scooters
• Mobility scooter review
• Best mobility scooters
• Mobility scooter parts
• Electric mobility scooters

Then take some of these longer such as:

• Where you can buy mobility scooters
• If you need a mobility scooter

You get the idea

Andy

[jj3434]

Yep - thank you.

[MarieHaynes]

Another thing you can do is take a look at your analytics sorted by organic search traffic.  Then, take the dates of the known Panda updates and Penguin updates and see if any of them correlate to the time of your traffic drop.  If it correlates to Panda then it's a content issue, and if it correlates to Penguin it's a links issue.

It could be both though...if you've got 70% of your links having keyword anchor text this is a risk for Penguin.

Another thing you can do is sort your analytics according to anchor text.  Let's say your top search term was "blue widgets".  If your organic traffic for "blue widgets" dropped drastically after April 24 then it's likely Penguin.

But it's tough to know though as there were Panda updates on either side of Penguin.

[jj3434]

Hi

We had top listings for the main anchor text used, these are the terms which we have dropped out all together for....

The drop happened on the 28th Sept...